Psychoanalysis at the Time of the Posthuman: Insisting on the Outside-Sense

Abstract

This article ‘diagnoses’ the discourse of posthumanism as a contemporary symptom, and thus as a mode of the social link that attempts to deal with the real of the human condition as, precisely, non-natural. In order to then interpret this posthuman symptom, the article outlines the psychoanalytic notion of interpretation itself, not as the laying bare of a latent meaning, but as the inducement of truth-effects which are distinct from scientific understandings of truth premised upon identity and non-contradiction. Lacan's Seminar XVII is then utilized both as an example of the psychoanalytic interpretation of contemporary life, and as a resource for thinking through the reification of science and technological ‘lathouses’ that underpins the posthuman era. The article concludes with a strong defence of the capacity of psychoanalysis to hold open a space for the ‘outside-sense’, or what evades capture by the (scientific) signifier. It is argued that this ‘outside-sense’ is what truly constitutes the human insofar as humans are speaking beings.